Didn’t do much work on any of my projects this weekend though I did get some time stuck into Shadowrun Returns which I’m greatly enjoying. What little project work I did do this weekend was spent on getting a consistent and reproducible Ruby Sinatra development environment setup using Vagrant, Chef Solo, and Docker. Once I’ve got a chance I’m going to try and write up my experiences in getting this all working.

I’m really intrigued by the concept of Docker and Vagrant where we can achieve a development environment which is very close to production in terms of dependencies and system setup, while being operating system agnostic. I have to give a big shout out to Ryan who’s been using these technologies as well and over the last couple of weeks while I planned things out and got them set up has fielded all of my questions and given me guidance when I’ve gotten stuck.

Unfortunately I’ve made little progress with Knockout.Router I’ve been attempting to use regular expressions to get the parsing of the route URLs for dynamic routing working as I’d like them to, but so far I’ve had little success.

Yesterday I got the chance to read an article about #NoEstimates which I found quite interesting. As someone who both has to do estimates and is a fan of agile I think that (in my workplace at least) we waste a lot of time on up front work needed to estimate projects (before handing them over to an agile software development team) which could be better spent giving the development team some time to get stuck into the project, I wouldn’t mind betting if that was the case we’d probably be able to give the business greater certainty over how long we think it might take than what we do currently.

Over the coming week I have a couple of things I would like to try and achieve:

• I want to get my site migrated over to GitHub Pages as the only thing I am using this server from Host4Geeks for is hosting this site which feels like a bit of a waste.
• I would like to get another blog post written. At the moment I’m tossing up between redoing a post I lost when I built this site or about my experiences with setting up my dev environment.
• I want to try and get dynamic routing working for Knockout.Router.

Hopefully by putting them up on the web I will actually bring myself to do them.